Escort :: 2003 ZX2 - Burning Smell Through Vents Now Heater Doesn't Work


Nov 2, 2014

Okay, so the car in question is a 2003 Escort ZX2 with roughly 110k on the clock. It's run like a champ up until now. My wife was driving it home from work the other day and said that there was a burning smell coming through the vents, then the coolant temp gauge on the dash went all the way to hot and stayed there, and the heat simultaneously stopped working.

She got it home and I quickly found out that the car IS NOT overheating. Something screwy is going on with the gauge and it will sit at cold for 10 minutes, then go all the way to hot, then sit in the middle, and it's just all over the place. However, the engine fan works fine and comes on at the appropriate time, the engine does not overheat at all, and other than the gauge acting weird and the heat not working, the car runs as it always has.

So, just a as a measure of preventative maintenance I replaced the thermostat, thermostat housing, and both clip-in coolant temp sensors on the thermostat housing. This seems to have fixed nothing, but oh well.

Next, I let the car heat up and checked the two hoses going to the heater core in the firewall. One hose is just slightly warm (even at full operating temperature) and the other is completely cold.

When you get in the car and attempt to turn the heat on, all the blower motor speeds work. When you turn the dial from cold to hot you can see under the dash that the cable that opens the blend doors is working fine as well. However, no heat at all, it's just cold air that comes from the vents even on the hottest setting.

The heater core isn't leaking at all, this has been confirmed.

So, I'm unsure where to go from here. The wacky coolant temp gauge seems like maybe it's the actual gauge itself that's gone south (in which case I'd need a new gauge cluster I suspect). The heat though perplexes me. Sure, the heater core could be plugged but that seems rather unlikely considering the coolant has always been regularly flushed and when you open up the radiator there's no gunk or rust or anything in the system at all.

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